Free Company Content

I was regaling my FC with tales of the 1.0 era and I remembered a few of the planned but lost updates that were originally slated to happen before the subsequent chaos of retooling the entire game in ARR.

I for one run a rather busy FC with my friend and we’ve long desired more FC content that requires you to actually run with your FC. They had originally planned things like ocean exploration/battles and large scale siege content. We saw things like FC owned ships etc in the mock-ups. I’d be interested to know what sort of content other people would like to see on this vein.

Obviously if such content existed and had good rewards it would likely eliminate smaller Free Companies as members would take off for more established FCs with the members and resources to complete this content, however SE already talked about a solution to this in one of the very early live letters. They had a plan where you could form an alliance with another FC to make an official sister FC and they would be able to join you for Free Company content without changing or having to dissolve their existing Free Company. I feel like this would allow smaller groups to participate in large scale content without losing the smaller FC they have in place.

I’d love to see something like this as I feel it would allow them to create this type of content but have a way to make it accessible to smaller groups. SE had quite a few good ideas for this game and it would be nice to see some of them come to fruition.

It would be good if they create this alliance system.

Some small FCs could be united as one.

They could do something similar as the Island Sanctuary but for FC members inside one such alliance. But instead of "living in a farm" we could have another concept of interactions allowing parties and team work (like "fates") inside this area. What do you think? :)

Any type of content could just be made without a lock to FC necessary. FCs are social structures, the thing that gives them life are the people inside not the label "free company"

I'm going to assume your idea would allow cross world alliances. Do you want one FC to only be part of one alliance?

The entire point would be content to do with your FC for the benefit of the FC, it would also give more of a use for the FC points as many free companies generate far more than they can use. The alliance would allow a smaller group to combine resources and join with another FC to do this content and retain the goal of keeping their FC relatively small as some people shy away from larger free companies. If you visit the Community page they even have weekly/monthly rankings for free companies but it’s solely based on how many points you generated. Depending on the nature of the content they could make it competitive with rankings. Many people consider an FC a glorified chat channel, so it would be nice to have content that would encourage people to engage and foster teamwork to earn cool new rewards for your free company.

Whenever I run content with FC mates, I have a great time. Whether that be 4-man dungeon, 8-man trials or maps, 24-man raids. I find the PF system to do a great job at serving its purpose (and it is superb) but conversations tend to be limited to:

o/ when you start and...
gg when you wrap up

And I'm fine with that. But at times, it is like running it with NPCs. Hell, the NPCs actually talk more. While I am grateful for the PF system, I'm glad my FC does run 24-man and 8-man content on a schedule, it makes for good times. I think SE should consider from FC-only restricted content. I just don't think it will happen. SE's actions in the last 9.5 years has signaled that FCs are pretty much social channels with a common place to hang out.

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Originally Posted by Wobi

The entire point would be content to do with your FC for the benefit of the FC, it would also give more of a use for the FC points as many free companies generate far more than they can use. The alliance would allow a smaller group to combine resources and join with another FC to do this content and retain the goal of keeping their FC relatively small as some people shy away from larger free companies. If you visit the Community page they even have weekly/monthly rankings for free companies but it’s solely based on how many points you generated. Depending on the nature of the content they could make it competitive with rankings. Many people consider an FC a glorified chat channel, so it would be nice to have content that would encourage people to engage and foster teamwork to earn cool new rewards for your free company.

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How would that be different from normal content that encourages people to engage in and foster teamwork to earn cool rewards? What kind of content do you envision? (dungeons? raids? chocobo races? treasure maps? fates?) How would FC points be used? How does this nebulous type of content become more interesting by only letting FCs engage with it?

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Originally Posted by dspguy

Whenever I run content with FC mates, I have a great time. Whether that be 4-man dungeon, 8-man trials or maps, 24-man raids. I find the PF system to do a great job at serving its purpose (and it is superb) but conversations tend to be limited to:

o/ when you start and...
gg when you wrap up

And I'm fine with that. But at times, it is like running it with NPCs. Hell, the NPCs actually talk more. While I am grateful for the PF system, I'm glad my FC does run 24-man and 8-man content on a schedule, it makes for good times. I think SE should consider from FC-only restricted content. I just don't think it will happen. SE's actions in the last 9.5 years has signaled that FCs are pretty much social channels with a common place to hang out.

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This. I am doing far more than ever with my FC as I get higher level and having a blast. The duty support/trust system is more interesting than running with PUGs because yeah; they talk lmao.

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Originally Posted by Wobi

I was regaling my FC with tales of the 1.0 era and I remembered a few of the planned but lost updates that were originally slated to happen before the subsequent chaos of retooling the entire game in ARR.

I for one run a rather busy FC with my friend and we’ve long desired more FC content that requires you to actually run with your FC. They had originally planned things like ocean exploration/battles and large scale siege content. We saw things like FC owned ships etc in the mock-ups. I’d be interested to know what sort of content other people would like to see on this vein.

Obviously if such content existed and had good rewards it would likely eliminate smaller Free Companies as members would take off for more established FCs with the members and resources to complete this content, however SE already talked about a solution to this in one of the very early live letters. They had a plan where you could form an alliance with another FC to make an official sister FC and they would be able to join you for Free Company content without changing or having to dissolve their existing Free Company. I feel like this would allow smaller groups to participate in large scale content without losing the smaller FC they have in place.

I’d love to see something like this as I feel it would allow them to create this type of content but have a way to make it accessible to smaller groups. SE had quite a few good ideas for this game and it would be nice to see some of them come to fruition.

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Yes it sounded interesting when they mentioned competing for a FC primal

((Heavensward Diadem rears its ugly head.))

While such ideas sound good in our heads, they don't work out well in practice. Formal FC only content and FC Alliances run into problems.

Who ends up responsible for organizing the FC only content runs? What happens if they can't play or leave the FC?

What rewards are interesting enough to keep repeating the content without making FC membership feel mandatory to get those rewards?

What happens when the rewards everyone wants are assigned to a type of content the FC doesn't do while the type of content the FC likes to do hasn't be added or has poor rewards in comparison?

What happens when your FC has more members online than the content allows or not enough online to meet the minimum party requirements?

How do you stop those organizing content events from encouraging flattery and bribes from members trying to get picked for content, or stop FC officers from pressuring those individuals to include their personal favorites?

Who gets to be the boss in an Alliance with final say on what the Alliance does and what roles members from each FC get to have?

How do you prevent cliques and favoritism from occurring so everyone has equal access?

How do you stop displays of elitism by those who feel they contribute more to the FC than others (even when they don't) and therefore should have priority?

If your initial thought to any of these is "that would be someone else's problem to solve", then you're seeing the problem with such systems. Everyone is fine with them as long as they don't have any responsibility but also are always included when they want to be included. The moment they're asked to take on some of the responsibility or get excluded, drama starts. And most of the time, that ends up falling back on the game developer as players scream "this isn't what we wanted!".

Informal systems work better for informal social groups, which is what a FC is. You do things together because you enjoy each other's company, not because you're out for the reward.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

((Heavensward Diadem rears its ugly head.))

While such ideas sound good in our heads, they don't work out well in practice. Formal FC only content and FC Alliances run into problems.

Who ends up responsible for organizing the FC only content runs?

What rewards are interesting enough to keep repeating the content without making FC membership feel mandatory to get those rewards

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I feel like you’ve been in some very badly run FC’s, like any content the people interested will turn up and if you have too many you can always run multiple groups. It’s something we commonly do in ours when turnout for raid/dailies/maps are high enough. Ideally this type of content would be scalable and more of a participation focused content. I’m talking about fairy casual content. There could also be rewards for those who participated as well as general rewards as your FC ranks up in the new content that anyone would have access to. People keep trying to make this a single player game and we could honestly use some MMO type content that encourages grouping up.

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Originally Posted by Wobi

I feel like you’ve been in some very badly run FC’s, like any content the people interested will turn up and if you have too many you can always run multiple groups. It’s something we commonly do in ours when turnout for raid/dailies/maps are high enough. Ideally this type of content would be scalable and more of a participation focused content. I’m talking about fairy casual content. There could also be rewards for those who participated as well as general rewards as your FC ranks up in the new content that anyone would have access to. People keep trying to make this a single player game and we could honestly use some MMO type content that encourages grouping up.

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Why not just make it regular content that doesnt require running it with people from only your own FC (or FC alliance). Then FCs could still run it but any other group of players could also run it. Where does the need to be FC only content come in?

I do agree that more "formal" FC activities should be in the game. Since there aren't, is it any wonder that so many solo FCs exist? There's no objective (formal) reason to be in a large one run by other people. Submarines would be a great group activity if the monetary rewards were divvied up by the game itself and not reliant on the good will of 1 person to decide to share the loot.

These threads always attract people who are in those rare FCs where people just do the old stale content together with no incentive and maybe the FC leader even shares submarine payouts with the whole group. And while that's great, it doesn't represent the norm at all, which is why so many people just make shell FCs and do everything themselves. The system needs attention, I agree. Saying that as someone who is currently in a solo FC because it's just objectively better in every way and there's no reason not to unless you're in some unicorn FC with a lot of active people who are really chill. And since the game's own director actively encourages people to quit, GL keeping your players active lmao

I think the devs made the FC system to be like this, with this lack of specific content. The reason, I think, is to not force people to use their FCs just for one way to approach social interactions inside game and to give the feel of liberty of action for everyone that run or is inside a FC. So, it's intentional, i guess.

Maybe, it falls for the players to create such events between FCs. And if the Alliance becomes something real, is for to make things easier to create.

In a way, I like this approach by them most.
So, if you want to give more meaning to your FC, try to make those events and if you cannot, try to, at least, identify what you can do to improve social interactions inside your FC, to the most possible as you can go. And if still you can't find a way or fail in that, well... there are more FCs out there you know u.u

Well the goal of fostering teamwork is to give a reason for increased engagement and something to work for together as unit. Hopefully this would make it more common for people to want to join in on FC events/etc and FCs like one would be less of a “unicorn”. Perhaps I’m too idealistic, because it seems quite a few free companies out there don’t really strive for teamwork and it’s every one for themselves. It’s not alway a bad thing for some content to require you to group up to obtain rewards. Some of my best memories in FFXI were when our linkshell (guild) finally beat the harder Dynamis bosses. Again, the content can be more casual in nature to lower the bar for entry, but the camaraderie of accomplishing goals with your guild/etc is a high worth chasing.

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Originally Posted by Wobi

Well the goal of fostering teamwork is to give a reason for increased engagement and something to work for together as unit. Hopefully this would make it more common for people to want to join in on FC events/etc and FCs like one would be less of a “unicorn”. Perhaps I’m too idealistic, because it seems quite a few free companies out there don’t really strive for teamwork and it’s every one for themselves. It’s not alway a bad thing for some content to require you to group up to obtain rewards. Some of my best memories in FFXI were when our linkshell (guild) finally beat the harder Dynamis bosses. Again, the content can be more casual in nature to lower the bar for entry, but the camaraderie of accomplishing goals with your guild/etc is a high worth chasing.

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Yeah I agree, it's great. In other MMOs I've played, there were systems in place to make this kind of thing happen semi-naturally. Guild missions were a thing, and while they were kinda grindy it didn't feel that bad because you were doing it with your guildmates. In XIV this sort of camaraderie feels like "rare" stuff because there's legit no reason to run stuff together unless you just happen to be feeling it at the time. Content gets drip fed and then there's like ... 4 months of nothing, so lots of people quit or get burnt out and it just doesn't feel good if you're the one trying to organize things and get people pumped to... *checks notes* do the old raid that nobody cares about, a 27th day in a row. It's rough. I feel for people trying to be the glue that keeps community FCs together. It's rough.

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Originally Posted by Avoidy

Yeah I agree, it's great. In other MMOs I've played, there were systems in place to make this kind of thing happen semi-naturally. Guild missions were a thing, and while they were kinda grindy it didn't feel that bad because you were doing it with your guildmates. In XIV this sort of camaraderie feels like "rare" stuff because there's legit no reason to run stuff together unless you just happen to be feeling it at the time. Content gets drip fed and then there's like ... 4 months of nothing, so lots of people quit or get burnt out and it just doesn't feel good if you're the one trying to organize things and get people pumped to... *checks notes* do the old raid that nobody cares about, a 27th day in a row. It's rough. I feel for people trying to be the glue that keeps community FCs together. It's rough.

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Before playing FFXIV I used to play Dofus, a tactical battle MMORPG made by a french company. There, the Guilds can be part of Alliances and engage in Alliance Wars to control areas (some other MMOs have a similar stuff) in a pvp format. When you are in a area controlled by the alliance where your guild belongs, you will receive a bonus to exp, drops, gatherers, etc. And you can drop a special currency to change for valuables.

People then, can join parties to attack crystals controlled by rival alliances and the victorius part earns prestige for all guilds inside of it. With more prestige, less taxes you pay at the markets. So, to be part of a guild is really interesting for everyone there.

I kinda liked this system. But in order for us to have a similar stuff in FFXIV, a lot of things should be changed, like the pvp. But, this can give us things to imagine... at least :)

I would to have fc-related activities that are somewhat... interactive? Maybe an instance where we can farm/upgrade our buffs, level our FC, do stuff that are related to submarine voyages, etc. All the "FC-related" content usually stays in the hand of one or two people. There is very little incentive to not just run a solo FC in this game.

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Originally Posted by Avoidy

Content gets drip fed and then there's like ... 4 months of nothing, so lots of people quit or get burnt out and it just doesn't feel good if you're the one trying to organize things and get people pumped to... *checks notes* do the old raid that nobody cares about, a 27th day in a row. It's rough. I feel for people trying to be the glue that keeps community FCs together. It's rough.

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Indeed. Back when I did try to organize FC-related stuff, there was not much to do besides maps and mount farms and these get stale quickly. At the same time, a lot of players just quit FCs that there is nothing happening. These are ok social activities but I wish there was something that could be done as a group in order to level up the FC, or actually make the FC "grow" somehow.

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Originally Posted by Wanzzo

In a way, I like this approach by them most.
So, if you want to give more meaning to your FC, try to make those events and if you cannot, try to, at least, identify what you can do to improve social interactions inside your FC, to the most possible as you can go. And if still you can't find a way or fail in that, well... there are more FCs out there you know u.u

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Back when I was managing an FC, it was really time-consuming. We literally had to think of ways to entertain people. I get that there are many people that enjoy this and dedicate a lot of time to this type of stuff, however I would like the game to give a hand to FC managers and do some sort of content so that people can feel like they're part of the FC and are actually helping it somehow instead of you having a half dozen managers (in a big FC) thinking how to entertain people and set-up stuff (at least in my experience people rarely start things on their own).

I have an interesting suggestion for this thread. You know how Squadrons have rank up missions in the barracks? basically going forward once your FC reaches current max rank there are rank up missions the FC must take to rank up. Once you've done all of those and you reach max rank again, the last rank degrades, and so you periodically have to do a new mission once a month to attain the max rank once more. This in turn allows the FC to purchase level 3 buffs instead of crafting them. It would give an alternative way for people who enjoy combat to acquire the level 3 buffs.

Or anyways, something along these lines.

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Originally Posted by Wobi

I was regaling my FC with tales of the 1.0 era and I remembered a few of the planned but lost updates that were originally slated to happen before the subsequent chaos of retooling the entire game in ARR.

I for one run a rather busy FC with my friend and we’ve long desired more FC content that requires you to actually run with your FC. They had originally planned things like ocean exploration/battles and large scale siege content. We saw things like FC owned ships etc in the mock-ups. I’d be interested to know what sort of content other people would like to see on this vein.

Obviously if such content existed and had good rewards it would likely eliminate smaller Free Companies as members would take off for more established FCs with the members and resources to complete this content, however SE already talked about a solution to this in one of the very early live letters. They had a plan where you could form an alliance with another FC to make an official sister FC and they would be able to join you for Free Company content without changing or having to dissolve their existing Free Company. I feel like this would allow smaller groups to participate in large scale content without losing the smaller FC they have in place.

I’d love to see something like this as I feel it would allow them to create this type of content but have a way to make it accessible to smaller groups. SE had quite a few good ideas for this game and it would be nice to see some of them come to fruition.

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I literally made a similar post and got nearly flamed to hell..../grabspopcorn

Weve had this conversation before a while back, but I still take my stance that I wouldnt mind seeing some expanded features or activities for FCs to do.

There is no tangible benefit to FC activities. If people in an FC want to do something with one another, they can. There's nothing stopping them from engaging with content already in the game while in an FC. With as many players as there are that prefer doing things outside of their FC, however, attempting to make FC-centric content would in fact serve only to alienate a not insignificant portion of the player-base. ....Which has already been alienated, repeatedly, as it is. Not a great idea financially.

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Originally Posted by Absimiliard

There is no tangible benefit to FC activities. If people in an FC want to do something with one another, they can. There's nothing stopping them from engaging with content already in the game while in an FC. With as many players as there are that prefer doing things outside of their FC, however, attempting to make FC-centric content would in fact serve only to alienate a not insignificant portion of the player-base. ....Which has already been alienated, repeatedly, as it is. Not a great idea financially.

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FCs have buffs, a leveling system, voyages, etc. The difference is that none of this is actually thought as a content that people can plan around and do together in the same vein as the rest. Re-working these in order to actually bring a social and perhaps even combat-related aspect shouldn't alienate anyone, given that it would be to benefit the FC at the end of the day.

It could even be similar to island content and involve a simple base building aspect and maybe unlock some vendors that sell items related to old content that are not commonly done anymore. Just something that the FC could work on together to help grow their free company and involve people beyond just a few officers/etc.

Every time we've had FC exclusive content, people who prefer playing solo come forward and say it isn't fair and the devs listen to them. The result is that individuals can get buffs, are going to get submarines and very, very little is left that requires a FC. The workshop is FC exclusive, but it's basically single player and it excludes FCs who do not have houses.

There is no real benefit to joining a FC, and because there is no content and no rewards it's very hard to keep one going. The only FCs I've seen thrive and survive long term are small 'friends and family' FCs or raiding FCs. It's a real shame we don't have more FC content that encourages people to cooperate, unfortunately the game is going more and more towards being solo-friendly. That's not a bad thing in itself, but FCs could definitely do with a little more love.

There is a huge difference between doing content with random players and doing it with friends or FC members. Most of my good MMO memories are from doing things with friends.

Didn't they already try something like this with Diadem?

Thinking back about Diadem, it's actually a shame because that piece of content had so much potential. Even more a shame they didn't try with it.

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Originally Posted by Solarra

Every time we've had FC exclusive content, people who prefer playing solo come forward and say it isn't fair and the devs listen to them. The result is that individuals can get buffs, are going to get submarines and very, very little is left that requires a FC. The workshop is FC exclusive, but it's basically single player and it excludes FCs who do not have houses.

There is no real benefit to joining a FC, and because there is no content and no rewards it's very hard to keep one going. The only FCs I've seen thrive and survive long term are small 'friends and family' FCs or raiding FCs. It's a real shame we don't have more FC content that encourages people to cooperate, unfortunately the game is going more and more towards being solo-friendly. That's not a bad thing in itself, but FCs could definitely do with a little more love.

There is a huge difference between doing content with random players and doing it with friends or FC members. Most of my good MMO memories are from doing things with friends.

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Full on agree